- How Arsenal’s progress has been screwed by the rest of the league.
- Why watching football from England is a major disadvantage
By Tony Attwood
The suggestion that “Manchester City ramp up civil war with Premier League” in today’s headlines is surely something that strays a little from reality, since how can the “civil war” actually be ramped up any further?
It appears that ManC has now written a letter to other clubs saying that some of the rules in the Premier League are unlawful, or as the Daily Mail calls them “‘UNLAWFUL”. And what’s more this unlawfulness was expressed in an “11-page letter.” Well! If it is 11 pages long it is certainly going to be pretty important!
Now ManC have already sued the Premier League and the 115 charges against the club have still not been resolved, so the ManC claim that new sponsorship rules are unlawful at best adds a couple of inches to the pile of legal documents being exchanged.
But more interesting is the fact that ManC have told clubs not to vote for the new sponsorship rules in the coming week. Oh yes and a copy of the letter was also sent to the FA, although I am not sure that the FA ha the power to force the Premier League to change its rules. Indeed even if it does I suspect it wouldn’t since that could lead the League to resign from the FA.
Now that would lead to a spot of fun, because it would mean that no Premier League players who are categorised as English (which of course doesn’t necessarily have too much to do with where they were born) could not play for England, and the FA wouldn’t like that at all.
So the biggest threat now issued by ManC in reality is that if the League presses ahead with the new rule changes ManC will sue. And this is where the ManC approach to everything runs into trouble. Once a club sues the League then the nuclear button has been pressed, as it already has, and the clubs are thinking “do we want this club as a member? And the answer from the clubs is “no – they are not welcome here.”
Seen this way the chances of ManC and the rest of the League ending their differences and happily sharing the Premier League under the sort of rules that the vast majority of the clubs in the League want, grows ever slimmer.
Of course the League says the latest ManC suggestion is full of “repeated and baseless assertions”. And what makes it all a bit worse is that the issue of loans from shareholders to a club is still the basis of all the wrangling.
But having lost on a couple of technicalities last time over the issue of what the “fair market value” of a club is, and whether it should include loans from shareholders or not, (to which most supporters respond “who cares?”) some thought that might be it. But no.
The League did win some points in the last round, even though ManC said they didn’t, and are now making amendments to their rules to cover the points they lost last time. But what ManC now seem to be saying is that they want to have “effective and lawful regulation of related party transactions” and these changes are not that, and so the whole set of new rules controlling the Premier League clubs and their financial actions are unlawful, so the League must still act according to the old laws.
The one thing that the League might take from this in its favour however is that ManC are now citing “common sense” as being on their side, and normally when anyone in a legal case cites common sense, it means they are on shaky ground when it comes to the legal arguments. But ManC always throws in the threat of more legal action against the League for the simple reason that it can, if it wishes, keep suing the League until the rest of the League clubs stop being willing or able to fund the legal costs.
At the heart of the matter on the ManC side is the fact that when ManC benefitted from the enormous loans its owners have made to the club, ManC did not know the loans would become unlawful.
The Premier League however is now suggesting that they are getting thoroughly pissed off (to use the colloquial phrase) with repeated assertions that the League’s legal committee has repeatedly misled its members.
And so it goes on, and probably will go on, until the majority of the League resign their memberships, set up a new League and apply directly to the FA for recognition. The FA will then have the problem: last time this happened, it recognised the breakaway Premier League, so why not this time even though it would leave ManC as a leagueless club whose only recourse would then be to set up a new European League. And sue the FA.
In that case Barcelona would probably join ManC, as perhaps would Newcastle, but the move would give the clubs fighting ManC an enormous boost. For at present there is another war going on as the big clubs like Arsenal are fighting Uefa and Fifa over the number of international matches that are planned. In the battle hypothesised above the resigning clubs would probably be ejected by Fifa and Uefa, but would then set up their own international organisation which would incorporate a limit on the number of international games that players could be asked to play – thus bringing the players and their unions onside and leaving ManC as an employer out in the cold.
Man City are like the playground bullies of old, it has to be thier way or no way. Are legal cost include in PSR? The premiere league have to grab the bull by the horns here and tell City that if they don’t to comply with the rules then they must leave the league. This is not the middle east where money is the only thing that matters and where their power is absolute. It’s time to say goodbye to Man City.